


Strangers

by FELover



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Family, fam - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 21:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5179544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FELover/pseuds/FELover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The book’s definition said a family was, Miriel read to us, “A fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children living in the same household.”  </p><p>Robin, Lon'qu and I were not related by blood in any manner, but we did live in the same home for a fairly long time, and I'd like to think that after all we lived together we became somewhat of a family - often at odds, holding secrets from each other, but present at the moments that really mattered. We weren't perfect for each other, but that's all we had: Each other. </p><p>[Morgan runs from a scripted fate, Lon'qu runs from guilt and Robin runs from something that might only be in her head. They were all strangers forced by circumstances to stick together. Will they find the freedom, redemption and peace they all respectively searched for, or perhaps something more?]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangers

**Author's Note:**

> I know it may not look it, but this is totally a family thing. Trust me. The other day I heard on the news that places in Europe are having a busy time with big influxes of migrants and refugees, and I thought this up.

Back when I was in school, those few years that my father allowed me to attend because it was a way to keep me away from mom fearing that she’d get me sick, I had a teacher who praised me a lot. Her name was Miriel and she alone gave me and a couple of other kids lessons on several subjects, among them English.

I don’t know if she really believed that any of us would need to know English, but as it turns out it did help one person at least.

Attending school meant gathering around the communal fountain at the center of our town. Sometimes the women that washed clothes there would discreetly join in with us. My teacher didn’t mind new students, no matter how old or how many, she only minded when some older men would try to sit in with us, asking what we were talking about, it sounded interesting.

Miriel knew, as well as everyone else, that this was only an attempt at getting something out of us that could later be used to drive her out of town. It was bad enough already that she was a foreigner, but the fact that she was a woman, and she was educated, and she wanted to make some real changes around - all that gave the most traditionalistic locals some big pains.

Not that Miriel minded. She seemed to relish it, actually. It was apparently a sign that actual changes were happening and people were noticing.

“Teacher?” I asked her once. “Aren’t you scared?”

She merely huffed. “Nothing to be wary of surrounded by a bunch of ignorants. The ones you should be scared of are the ones who know more than you.”

She then gave me this serious look and put her hand on my head.

“Knowledge is power,” she said.

We had a lesson on social stratification one day. We were told in class about several medical care services and their providers around the world, although the majority of the time Miriel tried to help us understand what it meant to have medical care in other parts of the world. We also watched a movie in the teacher’s laptop - an idea in and of itself entertaining and exciting because computers to us Plegians were such high status symbols and so expensive that we backwater kids never dreamt of even seeing one in person, let alone watching movies in one.

The movie that we watched didn’t have any subtitles, and that was back when we’d just begun our English classes - I only knew how to say please and thank you, which, if you don’t know, are very fundamental words that can get you very far.

Anyway, we couldn’t understand what the people in the movie were saying, but the teacher explained to us the plot. Basically, it was about a family that ends up homeless after their home burns up. We were able to guess the rest on our own. We understood body language. We knew what was going on if we saw a man with leery eyes exchanging a mystery item for money in an alleyway, or if a woman looked humiliated after a man whispered in her ear, and in the next shot she was coming out of a closet straightening her clothes and got a bundle of crumpled bills.

After the movie was over, the teacher asked us all one thing.

“What is a family?”

A lot of kids were surprised by the question.

“Were we supposed to know from watching the movie?” they asked.

“Not necessarily,” Miriel said. “Just say, what is a family to you?”

What is a family? I wondered. My personal definition of a family was pretty basic and straightforward. A family was a father who complained all the time about the back-breaking work his father had done every damned day till the day of his death and how neither he, my mother or I had been worth it. And there was no way to ever repay that debt. I will explain more about this soon.

My definition of a family wasn’t… exactly happy. The book’s definition said a family was, Miriel read to us, “A fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children living in the same household.” Also a straightforward definition. Not very demanding. It was also terribly vague, in my opinion. Surely there were different types of families, right? In Plegia, we had only one acceptable kind; the nuclear family, which was also the textbook definition. Remarriage was not a common thing. And more often than not, if a family member was unable to sustain themselves they would be left out in the streets to fend for themselves.

This last thing wasn’t a reprehensible act. In fact, it was almost natural. See, in Plegia, people were _assigned_ jobs.

“I have been a brewer all my life,” my father told me once. “As was my father, and my father’s father before him. And you will be one too, one day. For you there is only one way to live; you have learned from me all that you will ever need to know to do the part. When you are of age, you will take a wife and have one daughter and one son, and no more, and if you have more,” he pointed at the rusted blade hanging on a wall of our house. “You will do as my father did with my brother, your uncle, same as your grandfather did with two uncles of mine as well as an aunt, with that same sword.”

I was to do these things, and my father, hopefully old enough so that I wouldn’t have to care for him for long, would retire leaving me his place at Brew 105. He would receive the pay of his entire working life and he would have to give it to me, same as his father had given him the earnings of his entire life. A Debt Inheritance system.

“When I am of dying age, I will retire, receive my earnings, and pay off my debt to my father through you,” my father would say. “And when you are of a dying age, you will retire, receive your earnings, and pay off your debt to me through your son, and he to his son, and so on. It will always be so. Eternal, as our Emperor.

* * *

 

When I was younger, my father would tell me of the Emperor of Plegia. He wasn’t a person, he’d say. He wasn’t like him or me. He was, more than human, an idea. He was Plegia, Her people, Her sands, Her government. Like the sands, the Emperor would change. He would have to be replaced, but the person making the replacement would be same-minded, and so the Emperor never really died or was truly replaced. The Emperor was an idea; it was eternal, and it reincarnated in the bodies of those who sat on the throne.

So, even if the emperors were considered as nothing more than servants of Plegia, nothing more than vessels to an idea, they at least had voices. True, what they voiced out was nothing more than the council’s wishes, the message they claimed our God had given them. But that was more than enough to make the rest of us mute Plegians jealous. It was the Emperor’s voice which dictated destiny itself inside our country.

And you don’t question the voice of one who is basically God, do you? In our country, that was the way things were done. We were all debtors until the very last of our breaths, and then somebody else would take our burden, and so on. That’s how the machine kept on cranking, how the sun rose and fell, how the stars lit up at night… We all had our roles to fulfill, somebody to pay something back to, a burden for an inheritance, and no say about the matter at all.

If my father didn’t die within the span of two years after he retired, he would have three fates in store; he would either be lucky to have a compassionate son who wouldn’t mind sustaining him for a while longer until he died, or his son would throw him out into the streets were he would find death soon enough, or he would take his family’s sword, rust-flecked and tainted with the blood of his brothers and sisters who his father had killed because no one in our district was allowed more than one daughter and one son, and he would kill himself. Same as my grandfather had done, not even waiting for a day to pass after his retirement.

I was certain my father would do as my grandfather. I don’t know how I knew - I just knew. There was something about him, an intensity in his gaze, a darkness in his eyes… A lifelessness. The nothingness of his eyes was always there and not a single time had I seen it change.

My father was a very humble man, a model citizen. He had no pride, no ambition, no dreams, no love… He didn’t even have hate. There were times I thought he hated my mother because the money his father had left behind after his death was quickly consumed in medicine - whatever type we had access to. I also thought at times that he hated me, because with my spindly arms I reminded him too much of mom in her weak state.

We knew nothing of her illness, just that it was very bad. If my father hated her then it was because of her illness, I thought. He was very superstitious and thought of any type of illness as a sign of weakness. And I thought he hated weakness.

Soon I realized though, he didn’t even have the _will_ to hate.

“My wife,” my father would say. “She should be a busy woman. She should be seen around the house, cleaning, cooking, sewing… She is not seen. She was unfaithful, susceptible to curses,” we still believed in witches back then. “And Grima saw this, and retired his protection from her. She is now sickly and useless to Grima. This is also my punishment for not keeping a closer eye on her.”

“He used to be kind,” my mother would say. “He even let me out of the house longer than other wives were allowed. When I fell ill he still cared for me, but when his prayers failed him he didn’t think to blame God for not healing me. Instead, he thought it had been my fault, for being foolish and weak of faith, and his fault also for giving me the time to be led astray.”

After my mother told me this thing about my father I stopped believing that he possessed the capacity to do anything but obey. Obey and fear. If ever I saw in him something resembling determination I had to remind myself that he had no such thing; it was only fear that I saw, the thing that kept him going in a desperate effort to pay his debt and keep himself under God’s protection.

* * *

 My father needed one daughter. He already had a son; me. But he needed one more child to meet the quota. The population in Plegia was strictly controlled so that there was a specific number of women and men. I was aware that in other places in Plegia the regulations were somewhat different; in some areas families were asked to have only a number of boys, or only a number of girls, or no children at all, or one boy and two girls, etc,.

Where I lived, my father was expected to have one more child, and it had to be a girl. If it was another boy, he would have to take the sword from the wall.

But with mom in her state, there were almost no chances that he could make it happen. He tried, I know. I know because mom slept in a room separate from his and when he visited her at night he had to walk by my room, which was in a hall between the two.

This house was a house just like every else’s in our district. There were three bedrooms - one for the parents and two others for the two children - and one kitchen. Our bathroom was out back - a latrine that flushed waste into a nearby field. These were the plans for every house in our district.

Since in our house I was the only child though, my father could afford to put my mother in a room different from his.

I was aware of the nights that he went to try to get my mother pregnant. I knew this was the only thing he could be doing there at night because I was the one who gave mom her medicines - whatever we had left of them since my father decided to resort to more traditional cures -, and he usually didn’t have a reason to see mom unless it was to demand that she got up off the bed to do as she was supposed to. But he would yell so loud I’m sure not only I, but all the neighbors could hear. Those nights that he visited her though, there was silence for a long time.

And I didn’t know what else could be done in such silence. The act, as I’d been explained it by my father, seemed like such a dreary thing that should be kept quiet and behind closed doors. It was just a thing that had to be done, like cleaning the latrine. Nobody really wanted to do it, but there was no avoiding it.

What did that mean for mom, though? Nobody liked to be caught cleaning the latrine, just like nobody desired to have others know they'd had sex, because it was such a dirty and embarrassing task, but women couldn’t hide it if they’d done it. They were the ones that carried the burden after becoming pregnant, whereas men had the luxury of avoiding shame. Because that’s what sex was. Shameful. Pregnant women in Plegia were unsightly.

I would sometimes think of mom, those times that my father visited her at night. What face would she have? Would she be crying? Would she feel humiliated? Or would she just lay there, staring at the ceiling, willing herself to imagine she was somewhere else?

Sometimes these thoughts would follow me to bed. I would have terrible nightmares where I could see her, her eyes wide and dull staring up. But the most horrible part was that I could see her because I was the one on top of her, not my father. It might as well have been me, or my grandfather, of my grandfather’s father… It could have been any and all of us, and mom could have been any and all of the women who had ever been a part of our family. She could have been any other Plegian woman who’d ever been reduced to nothing but a breeding machine. And I was just another man playing a role to make the sun rise and fall, to keep everything working smoothly into a thousand tomorrows filled with the same atrocities…

Forever.


End file.
